SIÔN JENKINS punished his daughters with a stick and attended lectures on the need to severely discipline children, his former wife, Lois, has claimed.
He was influenced by an American book called Spare Not the Rod, which states that the Bible advocates physically punishing children to prevent them becoming spoilt.
Last week Mr Jenkins, 48, walked free from court after a jury failed to reach a verdict in his third trial for the murder of the couple’s foster daughter, Billie-Jo Jenkins, in 1997.
Mrs Jenkins said that she and Siôn had attended a series of talks by James Dobson, the author of another book, Dare to Discipline, at their East London church, shortly after they married in December 1982.
“Siôn decided we had to discipline our daughters to the point of making them the most perfectly behaved children,” she told The Mail on Sunday.
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Mrs Jenkins, who now lives in Australia with a new partner, claimed that her former husband had a volatile, violent temper and was abusive to her from an early stage in their 16-year marriage. She said that he was particularly tense at the time of Billie-Jo’s death.
Mr Jenkins had applied for the headmaster’s job at William Parker School, in Hastings, where he was deputy head, but had received no written offer two months after being verbally awarded the post. “He became increasingly nervous and volatile . . . there was a problem with a reference and I now realise he must have been concerned that his lies over his qualifications had emerged during a background search,” she said.
It emerged during police investigations that Mr Jenkins had faked 85 per cent of the qualifications on his CV, including that he had attended Gordonstoun.
The couple went out for a Valentine’s Day dinner the night before Billie-Jo was killed, on February 15, 1997, but spent the evening arguing and Mr Jenkins was “like a bull on hot irons,” Mrs Jenkins said.
None of the juries at the three trials were allowed to hear testimony from Lois Jenkins about the domestic violence she alleges was a regular feature of their family life.
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In statements also never read to the Old Bailey jury, the couple’s daughter Annie, then 12, said that her father had once punched her so hard in the stomach she had to lie down. When police asked her about the beatings, she said: “Doesn’t every family have a naughty stick?” Siôn Jenkins was jailed for life in 1998 for the murder of 13-year-old Billie-Jo, who was bludgeoned to death with a tent peg, but was freed in 2004 after new scientific evidence cast doubt on his conviction.
Juries in two subsequent retrials were unable to reach verdicts, and the Crown Prosecution Service has said that it will not seek a fourth trial. Mr Jenkins has denied allegations of violence towards his family, and has always protested his innocence over Billy-Jo’s death.
In diaries written four years ago while in prison for the killing and published in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, he claimed that he wanted to attend his foster daughter’s funeral but was prevented from having any involvement in it by her family.
“I felt deep pain because I had loved her,” he wrote.